Herald Tribune - 1 декабря

Allan Kozinn New York Times Service

George Harrison, the lead guitarist of the Beatles and the composer of several of the group's most beautiful songs, died of cancer Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 58.

Mr. Harrison, who had surgery for throat cancer in 1998, died at a friend's home. His wife, Olivia Harrison, and son, Dhani, 24, were with him.

"He left this world as he lived in it, conscious of God, fearless of death, and at peace, surrounded by family and friends," the Harrison family said in a statement. "He often said, 'Everything else can wait but the search for God cannot wait, and love one another.'"

Mr. Harrison's death follows the murder of John Lennon in 1980 and leaves Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney as the surviving members of the Beatles.

"I am devastated and very, very sad," Mr. McCartney said outside his London home Friday. "He was a lovely guy and a very brave man and had a wonderful sense of humor. He is really just my baby brother."

In the 31 years since the Beatles broke up, Mr. Harrison made a series of variably successful solo albums, ran a recording label of his own, Dark Horse, that had a small but varied catalogue, and was the executive producer of Handmade Films, an independent production company that had several hits between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. He also published several volumes of memoirs and organized a variety of philanthropic projects, including the legendary concert in 1971 for famine relief in Bangladesh that set the pattern for all-star charity rock concerts.

But Mr. Harrison will unquestionably be best remembered as the youngest and most reticent of the Beatles. In 1962, when the quartet recorded its first hits, he was only 19, yet from the start he projected an air of intense seriousness. He was the first Beatle to find the group's screaming fans tiresome, and the first to argue that so long as the audience was not listening to the performances, touring was pointless.

"I always really enjoyed our early days, before we got too famous," he once said in an interview. "We used to play clubs and that kind of stuff all the time. And it was fun. It was good because you get to play and get quite good on the instrument. But then we got famous, and it spoiled all that, because we'd just go round and round the world singing the same 10 dopey tunes."

In the summer of 1966, the other Beatles came around to his point of view, and thereafter confined their work to the recording studio.

Although Mr. Lennon and Mr. McCartney were the group's principal songwriters, Mr. Harrison had a decisive influence on the Beatles' sound.

His fascination with Indian music, which began in 1965, pushed the group's sound into a new direction. His Indian interest proved more broadly influential as well: after he played a sitar solo on Lennon's "Norwegian Wood" and began writing his own songs based on Indian motifs, the sitar was adopted by dozens of other rock groups, from the Rolling Stones to the Jefferson Airplane, and the "raga-rock" style was born and briefly thrived.

Of the four Beatles, Mr. Harrison was the most troubled by the invasions of privacy brought on by fame. "They gave their money and they gave their screams," Mr. Harrison said during an interview for the "Beatles Anthology" television documentary, which was shown in 1995. "But the Beatles kind of gave their nervous systems. They used us as an excuse to go mad, the world did, and then blamed it on us."

At the height of Beatlemania, he was characterized by the press as "the quiet Beatle." Later, Mr. Harrison did his best to put the world at a distance. He rarely gave interviews and multilingual signs posted outside his Victorian mansion in Henley-on-Thames, England, brusquely warned sightseers away. He was often impatient with autograph seekers, sometimes tearing up the item he was asked to sign or signing perfect copies of all four Beatles' signatures.

George Harrison was born in Liverpool on Feb. 25, 1943, and was the youngest of Harold and Louise French Harrison's four children. His father drove the bus that took him -

and Mr. McCartney, who was a year older - to the Liverpool Institute, where he showed little interest in academics. He devoted himself fully to the guitar; by the time he was 14, he was in a band called the Rebels with his brother Peter. Mr. McCartney was in another group, the Quarry Men, which was led by Mr. Lennon.

Early in 1958, Mr. McCartney invited Mr. Harrison to a Quarry Men performance. Mr. Lennon at first considered him a talented but sullen child, but Mr. Harrison continued to tag along with Mr. McCartney, and within a few months he was in the band, which in 1960 was renamed the Beatles. The Beatles always described themselves as a democracy, but the early success of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership put those two in a brighter spotlight. Mr. Harrison was at first content with a subsidiary role, playing his solos and occasionally stepping up to the microphone to sing rock classics. In time, Mr. Lennon and Mr. McCartney began writing songs with his voice in mind, among them "Do You Want to Know a Secret" and "I'm Happy Just to Dance With You."

In 1963, Mr. Harrison wrote his first song, "Don't Bother Me," which was included on the group's second album, "With the Beatles."

Another year and a half elapsed before Mr. Harrison was able to interest the band in another of his songs, but two of his compositions, "I Need You" and "You Like Me Too Much," made it onto the "Help!" album in 1965. At the end of that year, Mr. Harrison used a sitar on a Beatles album for the first time, and he soon began studying formally with the sitar master Ravi Shankar.

To put his sitar studies to practical use, Mr. Harrison began writing songs in an Indian style, and inviting Indian musicians to Beatles' sessions to help record them. The first of these was "Love You Too?," on the "Revolver" album. "Within You Without You," Mr. Harrison's lushly orchestrated contribution to "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," took this influence farther. Hinduism attracted Mr. Harrison. Listeners who thought that the other Beatles were merely indulging his exoticism were incorrect: his spiritual interests addressed their concerns as well, and when Mr. Harrison was won over by the Transcendental Meditation techniques of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, his bandmates followed him to India to study at the Maharishi's feet.

The other Beatles quickly gave up on Eastern philosophy, but Mr. Harrison remained a devotee of Hinduism, or Krishna Consciousness, as he preferred to call it. In his music, though, he returned to a more conventional Western style, ranging from the proto-heavy metal of "All Too Much," to the poetic "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."

The group spent the summer of 1969 making what it considered its swan song, "Abbey Road." Two of Mr. Harrison's finest Beatles compositions, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun," were included on the album, and "Something" became the first of his songs to be released as the A-side of a single.

Soon after the Beatles broke up, Mr. Harrison assembled some of his musical friends - among them Mr. Starr, the guitarists Eric Clapton and Dave Mason, the keyboardists Gary Brooker and Billy Preston and the pedal steel guitarist Pete Drake - and began recording the songs that the Beatles had not had time for. The sessions were so fruitful that the resulting album, "All Things Must Pass," included two disks of new songs and a third with jam sessions.

That the album was a hit was gratifying for Mr. Harrison, but it created new problems as well. The chorus of one of his new songs, "My Sweet Lord," bore a striking similarity to that of the 1963 Chiffons hit, "He's So Fine," and he was sued for copyright infringement. The suit dragged on Fine," and he was sued for copyright infringement. The suit dragged on for 20 years, and although Mr. Harrison was found guilty of "unconscious plagiarism," he ended up buying his antagonist's company, thereby owning both songs. He also had a hit with a satirical song about the lawsuit, "This Song," in 1975.

Mr. Harrison took a three-year break from music in 1976 to focus on his record label, Dark Horse, and his work as a film producer. He also used that time to sort out his personal life. He had met his first wife, Pattie Boyd, on the set of "A Hard Day's Night" and married her in 1966. Their marriage broke up in 1974, when Ms. Boyd began living with Mr. Clapton (whose song "Layla" was written for her). Mr. Harrison remarried in 1978.

In the 1980s, he had further success with a solo album, "Cloud Nine," that featured a skewering of Beatles nostalgia, "When We Was Fab." He also joined with friends Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty to form the Traveling Wilburys, a group that recorded two albums.

''Although I have guitars all around and I pick them up occasionally and write a tune and make a record, I don't really see myself as a musician," Mr. Harrison once said, explaining his ambivalence to the life of a rock star. "It may seem a funny thing to say. It's just like, I write lyrics and I make up songs, but I'm not a great lyricist or songwriter or producer. It's when you put all these things together - that makes me."

СПАСИБО BOND (VOX)!

Спасибо, Corvin, за переклейку.
Статья неплохая, вполне годится для энциклопедии Британника по теме Джоржд Харрисон, но ничего особенно нового в ней нет (по крайней мере для меня - самодовольная улыбка).
Кстати, у кого-нибудь из наших есть оригинальная ссылка на песню Шиффонов, из-за которой разгорелся весь сыр-бор. Я лично никогда ее не слышал, думаю, что многие из коллег по клэбу тоже. Интересно было бы послушать и сравнить.
Стоит ли говорить о том, что я буду заранее благодарен.

Лет 10 тому в какой-то советской радиопрограмме я слышал абзац, посвящённый этим неприятностям. Там же передали фрагмент этой Hi's So Fine. К сожалению, в самом деле есть очень похожие куски.
Но я больше скажу. В той же передаче было сообщено, что этот самый Chiffons тоже её слямзил у кого-то (не вспомню щас).

У меня есть MP3 The Chiffons- He's So Fine(2,2mgb). Кому надо, могу послать на E-Mail.

Славик, будь добр вышли мне Шиффонов.
Интересно самому составить мнение о том насколько это похоже на шедевр Харрисона.

Песню послал, только она почему-то назад вернулась с таким сообщением -
This Message was undeliverable due to the following reason:

The user(s) account is temporarily over quota.

Спасибо, за попытку Славик, очевидно, этот адрес не принимает больших сообщений, попробуйте, если это Вам, не слишком затруднительно, следующий адрес:
elkost@usa.net.
Заранее благодарен